Zoom on Wednesday launched new products at its Zoomtopia conference, including an upgraded AI companion that can work across meeting apps, as well as the ability to add your own notes, AI-powered meeting scheduling, and AI avatars that resemble users. With these features, the company aims to compete with verticalized meeting startups and productivity suites.
The company has long offered an AI bot that can record and transcribe Zoom meetings. However, cross-application meeting notetakers like Read AI, Otter, Fireflies, Granola, and Circleback have made great progress. To tackle that, Zoom is making its AI companion work with other platforms such as Meet and Microsoft Teams, along with a feature to take notes during in-person meetings.
The company is taking a page out of Granola’s book to let users jot down their own notes during meetings, then have AI expand and structure them later. Zoom is also adding cross-platform search so users can retrieve information from across Google’s and Microsoft’s platforms.
New calendar-related features are also on the way. Through its AI Companion, the company will allow users to find time slots that work for all attendees. Plus, it can suggest meetings you can skip through a new “free up my time” request. (Notably, calendar tool Clockwise launched a similar tool last year to resolve meeting conflicts.)
